About SpeedCon

It was quite surprising just how fast SpeedCon came to be. Even though the idea of meeting eachother had probably crossed the minds minds of most runners, I doubt there were many of us that actually thought it would be possible in the first place. This is probably since we overlooked the very large number of Europeans involved - getting _everyone_ together would be impossible, as we're spread all over the world (ranging from Singapore to Washington State), but organizing an event for the Europeans would be more likely to succeed - and it did, and we even had Nolan coming over from the US.

The idea was first raised by Stefan Schwoon. On the 3rd of March 2000, he sent an email to the main QdQ-mailinglist, to see if enough people were interested in a meeting. Here's part from that mail:
"Our small speed-running community is mostly an online group, and most of us know each other only through e-mail or other electronic communication channels. There are a few exceptions to this, e.g. people living close to each other, and lately we've seen some more personal contacts, e.g. Ilkka's visit in Amsterdam, or my own visits at Marlo's and Fabian's place. I must say that our meetings were great fun and that having met these two in person now makes a huge difference to me.

Recently I've spoken to some members of our community, and it seems that there is some enthusiasm about the prospect of holding a larger meeting sometime this summer. At the moment, nothing is planned (we're at the "wouldn't it be cool" stage, so to speak), so the purpose of this mail is to gauge the interest, to provoke some thinking and to collect ideas."
The early SpeedCon 'progress page'

Shortly after this mail, the mailinglist was deluged with enthusiastic reactions from everyone, and the mere fact that everyone seemed to really like the prospect of hanging out together probably raised the enthusiasm even further. In the next week, Ilkka quickly threw up a 'progress page', to monitor everyone's schedule during the summer, and ofcourse to see what people could possibly host the event. Pretty soon Ilkka's place turned out to be the best spot: about the same distance to travel for most people, lots of place for people to sleep, and quite a few people from Finland itself who wanted to join.

With the place set, the dates followed soon afterwards: SpeedCon would start on the 9th of June, and last until the 14th (somehow, this seemed meant to be, as he 10th of June was QdQ's third anniversary (and RDE passed 4000 downloads this day)). The people that joined were Stefan, Ingmar, Fab, and Marlo from Germany, Will and Anthony from the UK, Nolan from the US, Ilkka, Juho-Jussi, Alexander, Juho, Matti and Janne from Finland, and Jesse from The Netherlands.

All flights were booked, a special set of QdQ-T-shirts was made for the occasion, and before we knew it, we were actually playing MadCoops together in Finland.

Apart from recording normal demos, we also initiated a new QdQ-production will be released shortly. Also, Stefan and Anthony used the opportunity to work on some of the tools that QdQ uses in their productions.

We didn't just play Quake though...we played a fun 6-on-6 match of football as well for example, and Fab's footbag skillz proved to be addictive as a we spent a lot of time footbagging too. I also got the chance to enjoy my first 'traditional Finnish' sauna (I'm probably not very likely to make a proper distinction bewteen 'traditional' and 'non-traditional' since it was my first sauna ever :) - and that was just _so_ damn good. Almost every activity but for the football was accompanied by mass consumption of beer, even though some of us weren't officially allowed to drink alcohol...

Ofcourse, not everyone that wanted to could make it to Finland. Some of us had exams, some of us live too far away, and at some point Ilkka's house was simply full. Those - and the simple fact that we all just had a slamming time - are the reasons we're already discussing the possibilty of arranging SpeedCon 2001 next summer, where hopefully even more people can join the fun.

For now, I hope everyone will enjoy the coops, and don't forget the pics, too.

-Jesse, 20th of June 2000